The Broadway Melody **** (1929, Bessie Love, Anita Page, Charles King, Kenneth Thomson, Eddie Kane) – Classic Movie Review 3624

ALL TALKING! ALL SINGING! ALL DANCING! Director Harry Beaumont’s 1929 movie is the first sound film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and the first musical to win Best Picture Oscar. It is also the first MGM musical and significant as well as the first full, all-talkie musical feature, setting the template for the musicals of the Thirties. Less good though is its record as the first film to win Best Picture without winning any other Academy Awards.

Bessie Love and Anita Page star as Harriet ‘Hank’ and Queenie Mahoney, country song-‘n-dance sisters from the vaudeville circuit who aim for the Broadway big time and the same dancing song-writing feller, Eddie Kearns (Charles King), who comes between them and busts up their act.

Eddie was in love with Harriet, but now he meets and falls in love with Queenie, who is courted by socialite Jacques Warriner (Kenneth Thomson). Eddie needs Harriet and Queenie for his number in one of Francis Zanfield’s big Broadway shows. Eddie Kane plays the hot-shot Broadway producer Francis Zanfield, an obvious reference to Broadway legend Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.

A huge hit in its day as 1929’s top grossing film, it spawned three more Broadway Melody films, Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937) and Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940). Of course this early sound film is not surprisingly now a creaky old thing technically and artistically. But it is still sweet and appealing, containing attractive sequences and great songs (by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed) including the title number and ‘You Were Meant for Me’, as well as George M Cohan’s ‘Give My Regards to Broadway’.

‘The Wedding of the Painted Doll’ sequence is presented as a spectacular two-tone, two-strip Technicolor sequence (though is now preserved only in black and white except for a short fragment from the beginning of the sequence).

Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed’s all-time-great number Singin’ in the Rain makes its first movie appearance surprisingly to little effect, only eventually to reappear as Gene Kelly’s great song-and-dance sequence in the 1952 movie classic of the same name, Singin’ in the Rain.

A silent version was also released as many cinemas did not yet have sound equipment in 1929.

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© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3624
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